Patricia Potter (28 page)

He couldn’t help himself this time. His hand went up to her cheek, softly touching it with infinite tenderness. His fingers explored her face, seeking to know her thoughts, her very soul. He brushed away a curl that had fallen over her left eye, his hand capturing the silky strands and holding them like newly found treasure.

Her eyes widened at the unexpected touch, at the gentleness of his fingers, at the immediate reaction they caused in the core of her body. The remoteness was still there in his face, but his eyes…

Dear Lord, his eyes were like the foaming ocean, deep and mysterious. They invited her to come to him, to surrender to him, to give herself to him.

To betray herself.

And she was helpless against them. Her fingers went up to that devilishly handsome face that made her forget everything she should remember. She touched the cleft in his chin, as she had wanted to since they met, and she watched with fascination as his mouth widened, the ends turning upward in the most charming smile she had ever seen.

The most charming, and challenging. For the challenge was most definitely there. Direct. Sensuous. Compelling.

And then she had no more time to think because his mouth was moving toward her, his lips reaching down for hers.

They touched, gently at first, then fiercely. The alarm inside her clanged, but she was no longer listening. She could only hear her heart, and it was greedy for what he was offering: a warmth so long denied her, a sweetness that turned her blood to honey, a need that made her body hum and tingle and come alive in the most wondrous ways.

His tongue moved inside her mouth, caressing and loving, awakening each sensitive nerve, igniting a chain reaction of exquisite sensations.

Quinn tried to move closer but it was impossible the way they were sitting. Not wanting to break the tenuous bond with words, he took her hand and gently but insistently urged her over to the bed.

She resisted for a fleeting moment of time, but surrender came quickly. She could no more fight him now than she could stop breathing. Closing her eyes, wondering if she was walking into disaster, but no longer caring, no longer able to think straight, Meredith Seaton gave herself into his hands.

C
hapter 15

QUINN KNEW
he was being a damned fool. His mind kept telling him that, but his heart didn’t listen.

He wanted her. He needed her. Christ, how he needed her.

Perhaps because she needed him, too, he thought. It had been obvious in her kiss, in her touch, in the wonder in her eyes. But he didn’t, couldn’t, go beyond that thought. He only knew that this moment was right. For whatever reasons, it was right.

She interested and attracted him as no other woman ever had. There was an explosive quality between them, that had always been between them even when he’d thought she was everything he disliked, even when she’d looked like a dressmaker’s worst nightmare. He had never known anything like this excitement before, this current that flowed between them with the unpredictability of a thunderstorm.

As they sat together on the bed, she looked up at him, and he wondered how he’d ever thought her unattractive. Her dark brown eyes were alive with emotion, with a wistfulness that reached into him and stole a piece of his soul.

Her light brown hair, so like wisps of gold in the sun, was silk to his touch. Her face was striking, full of character. The lips were full, the chin determined, the eyes wide and deep, the cheekbones high and exquisitely sculptured. His hard callused hand traced every feature. He expected questions, but none came. Instead she leaned into his touch, seeking the rough strength.

Quinn’s hand hesitated at the discolored bruise he had put there. He touched it lightly, wishing he could make it disappear.

As if forgiving him, she slid into his arms as if she belonged there, as if God had made them to hold her. He ran his hands up and down her arms, enjoying the feel of her skin against his fingers, relishing the way she snuggled deeper into his embrace.

He felt the boat move and knew they were leaving New Orleans. She stiffened for a moment, and he knew she, too, was reacting to the movement. Any decision had been taken away from them: his to let her go, hers to stay without any additional protestations. He felt her body relax and saw her head turn upward to look at him with lovely searching eyes, and his arms tightened compulsively around her.

There was no fear in her face, no hesitancy. It was as if she had made a silent decision and was at peace with it. Her hand reached out and took his right one, turning it palm-up, studying it. He allowed her to trace a line across his palm, although he didn’t like how much it could tell about him. Without his gloves he felt vulnerable, naked. Despite his best attempts, the leatherlike calluses remained from years of hard physical labor on road gangs, in quarries, and, toward the last, the coal mines. They were not the hands of a gambler—or of a gentleman. He saw the puzzlement in her face, but she kept the questions unasked. Perhaps because she had so many secrets of her own. This regard for privacy was, he thought with only a trace of cynicism, a quality unique in a woman, at least those he had known. It served to fuel his rapidly growing respect and fascination.

Gently, he took his hand away and brushed a lock of her hair back. The gesture was both gentle and sensuous as his hand hesitated near her ear, then touched it lightly, tentatively, as a child might reach out to touch a butterfly.

The air between them was pregnant with questions unasked and unanswered and yet neither was ready to shatter a peace that astounded them both with its quiet intensity. For the moment, there was a rare understanding, a silent communication between them that neither wished the other harm. There was something magical between them and it would disappear if either questioned it too far.

Meredith relaxed in his arms, her hands playing with the downy hair on his arms. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing arms the color of oak, deeply tanned and hard with muscle. There was so much strength in them. She had always sensed it in him, and felt it when he had kept her from falling that day at Brett’s bank. Now she watched the muscles straining against the skin, felt the tautness of a superbly disciplined body.

No questions, she told herself, or he might disappear in a puff of smoke. Or he might start asking some himself, again. And she didn’t want to lie to him, not anymore. She wanted to look up at his magnificent turbulent eyes and feel their warmth, not their mockery.

She wondered how anyone could feel this way, so tense and so eager and so alive. It was as if she had just awakened from a long sleep to find a world made of spun gold and silver and all the lovely colors of her beloved rainbows.

Meredith pushed away the nagging doubts; the distrust and suspicion. He was the young man who was once kind to her, who wiped away tears and built a swing. He was strength. He was comfort.

Yet there was a fragility about these moments. Like a crystal glass teetering on the edge of a table.

Perhaps he felt it too, that tenuousness, for as his hands lightly massaged her arms she sensed that he was restraining himself. Every touch seemed a test of his control, and he, like she, was painfully holding back, afraid of what might happen if he did not. They were both waiting.

Waiting for what?

Perhaps, Meredith thought, for the trust that would make it perfect, that would drive away the private demons that, even now, made them wary of each other.

She looked beyond him to the light streaming through the window. Perhaps several words, words that only a few people knew, would tell her what she wanted to know. But still she hesitated. At the moment, she was afraid to know, afraid that she was wrong, that she would be betraying all she believed in, that he was nothing more than what she once thought.

Her hand ran along a muscle on his lower arm and felt his body tense. She wanted to lean down and kiss the back of that hand, to nibble the rich brown skin until he trembled as she was doing.

Meredith shivered. She had never felt this way before. She had never really been kissed before, except by him, had never felt a man’s touch in this lazy erotic way.

Her hand dug into his arm, and she felt him lean back against the wall of the cabin, pulling her firmly to him. One hand took her chin and guided it toward his face. “You are a pretty lady, Meredith, and an intriguin’ one,” he said in that low drawl that made all her senses sing with an excitement she still didn’t understand.

But he didn’t give her any more time to analyze it, for his lips captured hers as a small groan rumbled from his throat. She could not stop one of her own as she hungered for a closer union of their bodies. She felt the bunching of his muscles against his clothes and the barely contained passion that warmed her clear through to her soul.

The questions in her mind, the reasoning of her brain, all disappeared as the fire between them ignited once more, this time with more appetite and greed and fury. He smothered her mouth, his tongue darting inside with voracious, searching need.

It was a need matched. Meredith had never known a kiss could have such power, could melt her down to her bones. An elemental force was between them now…as primitive and potent as the ocean pounding against cliffs or a tornado ripping trees from the ground. And as impossible to contain.

Her hands glided up his chest, feeling every knotted muscle under the shirt, touching the smoothness of his skin as the cloth separated at the neck. Shamelessly, she proceeded, fascinated with every facet of his lean taut body, intrigued at the way her own body responded when she touched him. Sensations, like whispers of a growing wind, rushed with increasing power through her veins, reaching into every extremity, and then pounding against the confines of the shell of flesh.

His mouth moved from her lips, and his tongue trailed fire upward until it reached the area around her eyes. It played against her skin with teasing gentleness, the gentleness that had once surprised her but did no more. She lifted her eyes and looked into his dark blue ones, and saw his own vulnerable puzzlement.

Her hands went farther back, to the nape of his neck and started downward, wanting to feel more of him, but he winced and drew back. No woman had touched him there in twelve years.

“You don’t know what you’re doin’, Meredith.” His voice was half groan, half plea, the drawl even more pronounced.

Amusement danced in her eyes. “I think, perhaps,” she said slowly, even tauntingly, “I do.”

But she didn’t, and he knew it. She was undoubtedly a virgin. That had been obvious from her puzzled and often frightened responses to his earlier kisses. For a woman of such Machiavellian traits, she was surprisingly innocent in many ways. There was a kind of…wanton shyness about her. He knew those were contradictory terms, and he hadn’t thought the combination possible. But he knew now it was. Her hands explored with a hesitancy that both soothed and aroused, while her eyes were like those of a startled deer, curious and fearful. He wanted her. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, yet he couldn’t have her.

He should stop now, stop until the puzzle was solved, the riddle answered. He was astonished at the intensity of his own feelings, of the aching longing he had for her, even though a certain wariness persisted in the back of his mind.

Perhaps she was nothing like Morgana. Or perhaps she was an even better actress. How could he even think about risking his neck, his freedom, again for a woman?

But quite traitorously, his hand moved up and down her back, causing her to tremble once more, and his lips went to the nape of her neck, which he nuzzled, feeling every movement of her body as it reacted to his hands, to his mouth. He wished bitterly his own body wasn’t reacting in the same fundamental, undisciplined way.

When a soft purr came from her throat, his mouth moved from the back of her neck to her lips. He claimed them urgently, with hunger and demand, with questions and accusations all unsaid, but there. They might as well have been spoken because her mind, all but senseless now, knew them. His kisses were punishment, and she meted out some of her own, her lips nibbling his, her tongue reaching into his mouth and spreading the same fire that was consuming her. And then his body was stretched taut against hers, and she could feel the swell of his manhood even through their clothes, could feel her own body’s response to it. It was a madness…an astounding, unbelievable lunacy.

Yet despite both their reservations, their suspicions, their best intentions, there was no longer any way they could hold back. If anything, the lure of forbidden fruit had made it impossible to stop, and there was nothing on earth now that could hinder the inevitable.

Quinn knew it even as he fought against surrender. But his body wouldn’t obey. His emotions wouldn’t obey. His hands wouldn’t obey as they went to the back of her dress and finished the job of unfastening the buttons. One hand played with her back, fingers running over her skin with breeze-light teasing while the other, with her help, tugged her dress and chemise from her body. He looked then, his dark gaze finding the elation, the wondrous expectation in her eyes, even as she shrank the slightest bit from the intensity of his eyes. Christ, but she was contradictory.

His hand gentled against her bare skin as he looked at her openly, at the beauty she had always kept well hidden. She had a lovely body, slender but well formed with breasts that held an invitation of their own. He leaned down, his tongue teasing the nipples into hard red buds, luring her body into new dimensions of yearning, of frantic hunger.